Setting up the customer segment export feature

As a site administrator, you can connect the staging or authoring environment with the production environment so business users can export customer segment information from the production environment. By retrieving and exporting the customer information from the production environment, the customer segment export file includes the most recent information for the customers in a segment.

About this task

To connect the environments for the export process, you must configure the Workspace quick publish connection between the environments. When a business user runs the export process in a staging or authoring environment, the export process uses the customer segment information in that environment to create a query to retrieve the segment information from the production database. This information is then exported from the production environment into the staging environment through the Quick Publish connection.

Procedure

  1. Configure the Workspace quick publish target. The customer segment export uses the quick publish connection to export information from the production environment into the staging or authoring environment.
  2. Synchronize the authoring environment with the production environment.
  3. Optional: If your site uses different locales, ensure that both the authoring or staging environment and the production environment support the same locales. If the locales are not supported, values such as the file name or customer names, which can use double-byte characters, might not export correctly.
  4. Ensure that the customer segments that business users might want to export exist in the staging or authoring environment that you are working within and exists in your production environment. If a segment that is being exported does not exist in the production environment, the generated export file does not include any data.

    The customer segments that might be exported need to have the same identifying values in both environments. For example, the MBRGRP.MBRGRP_ID value. By having the same values in both environments, you can ensure that the query retrieves data for the correct segment. If the ID values are different between environments, the query can fail to return information from the production environment database or return information for the wrong customer segment.

    For example, if you have a customer segment for customers under age 40 in your authoring environment and a segment for customers over age 40 in the production environment that both have an ID value of 10001. When a business user attempts to export the segment for customers under age 40, the query can export the data from the segment for customers over age 40 instead.

  5. Assign the Marketing Director role to users that have a valid business reason to access customer information.
    Users with the Marketing Director role have all of the access and responsibilities that users with the Marketing Manager role have. Users with the Marketing Director role are also responsible for maintaining the security of customer segment information. Users with the Marketing Directory role can download the customer segment export file, which can contain customer information. Users that have the Marketing Manager or Seller role can run the customer segment export process to create the export file, but cannot download the file.